Chapter 2 Elise
ELISE
The first shift was a battle.
Elise won the opening faceoff clean, timing the drop perfectly, sweeping the puck back to Lou before the Toronto centre had finished bending.
The Valkyries surged forward, three red jerseys moving up the ice in a tight formation, and the crowd rose with them, twenty thousand voices building into a wall of sound that pressed against the glass and vibrated through the boards.
Elise cut across the blue line and called for the puck.
The cold air bit at her cheeks, sharp and clean, and her legs churned underneath her, muscles warm from the pre-game skate.
She loved this part. The opening minutes, when the ice was fresh and the energy was pure and everything felt possible.
Five years she'd been playing centre for the Valkyries, and the first shift of every game still made her pulse quicken.
The pass from Camille was deflected by a Toronto defender who'd read it a half-second early.
The play reversed before Elise could adjust, and she pivoted hard, digging her inside edge into the ice, and back-checked toward her own zone.
The burn in her thighs was familiar. Welcome, even.
She slotted into her defensive position and watched Toronto cycle the puck along the boards.
Beside her, Lex Landry was already pressing the puck carrier, quick and aggressive, her skates carving the ice with that explosive first step that made her so dangerous. She stripped the puck loose, kicked it to her stick, and fed it to Camille in a single fluid motion. The arena erupted.
Lex was having one of those games. The kind where everything she touched turned to gold.
Elise watched her partner skate past, all raw power and fearless angles, and the hot knot in her stomach tightened.
Lex had scored four goals in the last three matches.
The sports media couldn't stop talking about her.
Landry's emergence as a franchise centre.
A dynamic playmaker who could reshape the PWHL. The future of the Valkyries' offence.
Nobody had written anything like that about Elise in years. Maybe ever. She didn't have a nickname. She didn't have a fan account. She had consistency and a good work ethic and the quiet knowledge that without her, the team's structure would collapse, even if nobody noticed she was holding it up.
Her game was different. Disciplined. Consistent.
She was the player coaches trusted in tight situations, the one who did the unglamorous work that didn't make highlight reels but held the structure of a team together.
She'd always been proud of that. But pride was a cold comfort when the woman beside her was burning brighter every week.
The whistle blew for an offside and Elise skated to the bench for a line change, her lungs working.
Mara was standing behind the boards, arms crossed, her sharp blue eyes tracking the play even during the stoppage.
As Lex came off the ice, Mara gave her a nod.
Small. Quick. An acknowledgment that could have meant anything.
There it was. She always saw it.
Mara had never been obvious about favouritism.
Too smart for that, too controlled. But the ground was shifting.
Lex was younger, faster, more explosive.
She played with an intensity that lit up stat sheets and sold tickets.
And she was dating Mara, which wasn't supposed to matter professionally but was impossible to ignore entirely, even for a coach as disciplined as Mara Ellison.
The thought was unfair, and Elise knew it.
Mara evaluated players on performance. If Lex was getting more ice time, it was because Lex was earning it.
That was how competition worked. That was how Elise had earned her own place years ago, by being better than the woman in front of her, by showing up every day and proving she deserved the jersey.
She knew that. It didn't help. The fear had roots deeper than hockey, roots that went all the way back to a working-class house in Southern California where her mother worked double shifts and her father rewired strangers' houses and nobody ever said I'm proud of you because there wasn't time and showing love meant showing up.
Elise had been showing up for this team for five years.
What happened when that stopped being enough?
She sat on the bench, elbows on her knees, and watched Lex skate circles around a Toronto defender.
The younger woman's acceleration was absurd, zero to full speed in three strides, and the arena gasped with collective admiration as she deked past a second defender and fired a shot that clanged off the post.
"Close," Frankie said from beside Elise, banging her stick against the boards. "She's having a night."
"Yeah." Elise took a pull from her water bottle and squeezed it until the plastic crackled. Wiped her chin guard with the back of her glove. Stared at the ice. Waited for her name to be called.
When her next shift came, she threw herself into it.
She won three consecutive board battles in the offensive zone, using her body to shield the puck and her stick to direct the play, and when she came off the ice Lou caught her eye and gave her a nod.
Not as visible as the one Mara had given Lex, but from Lou Calder, it was practically a standing ovation.
The first period ended scoreless. Both teams retreated to their locker rooms, and Elise sat in her stall and stared at the floor and tried to loosen the tension that had taken up residence between her shoulder blades.
Across the room, Lex was laughing with Camille, helmet off, dark hair damp with sweat.
The easy confidence of someone who didn't have to worry about where she stood.
Elise pulled her water bottle from the shelf and drank half of it without tasting anything.
The game tightened as the periods wore on.
Toronto had brought a physical system, heavy and grinding, and they weren't shy about using it.
Their forwards drove into the corners with shoulders first. Their defencemen finished every check.
And their centre, a tall woman named Kowalski with a broken nose and dead-eyed focus, was camping in the Valkyries' zone like she planned to file a lease.
Kowalski had been targeting Elise since the opening whistle.
Not Lex, not Camille, not any of the players who scored the goals and grabbed the headlines.
Elise. Because Elise was the one who won the faceoffs and controlled the pace and disrupted the cycles, and Kowalski was smart enough to know that if you broke the engine, the machine stopped.
Stick taps on her shins during stoppages.
Shoulder bumps after the play was blown dead.
A glove shoved into the back of Elise's helmet during a scrum along the boards.
The persistent, low-grade harassment that referees ignored and opponents felt in their bones.
Every time Elise set up in the faceoff circle, Kowalski was there, leaning in, breath hot and sour behind her cage.
"Scared to take a hit, Moreno?"
Elise said nothing. She won the faceoff, clean and sharp, and sent the puck back to Lou without giving Kowalski the satisfaction of eye contact.
But Kowalski kept coming. On the next shift, she drove Elise into the boards after the puck was gone, a late hit that sent Elise's helmet rattling against the glass. The crowd booed, a sharp burst of collective anger that rose and fell like a wave. The ref's arm stayed down.
Elise peeled herself off the boards. Her back ached where the crosscheck had landed and the glass had left a cold stripe along her cheek. She kept playing.
She wasn't the type to retaliate. Never had been.
Growing up, she'd watched her father absorb one frustration after another without complaint.
Late payments from clients. A herniated disc he couldn't afford to treat.
Her sister Sophie's orthodontics bill. He'd just kept going, kept working, kept doing the next thing that needed doing.
Elise had inherited that. The quiet endurance.
The refusal to let anyone see her break.
Lou always said Elise was the team's anchor, the player everyone counted on to keep things steady when the game got ugly. And Elise took the compliment at face value, because it was true. But sometimes being an anchor just meant staying in one place while everyone else moved.
The second period ground on. Toronto scored first on a deflection that bounced off Dani's pad and trickled over the line, a garbage goal that felt like a gut punch.
The crowd went quiet. On the bench, Mara's jaw tightened.
Elise stared at the scoreboard and the 0-1 and the anger in her chest burned hotter.
But the Valkyries responded. Camille buried a power play goal off a gorgeous pass from Rowan Pike, the puck rocketing past the Toronto goalie's glove into the top corner.
The arena exploded. Camille slid to her knees, arms spread, blonde hair flying, and the rest of the team piled onto her against the boards.
Even Mara pumped her fist behind the bench. The score levelled at 1-1.
The arena was loud and tense, an atmosphere that made the ice feel smaller and the stakes feel larger.
Elise's legs were heavy with the deep muscular fatigue that came from playing a physical game at full intensity.
Her lower back ached from Kowalski's earlier crosscheck.
Her mouth tasted of the rubber guard she'd been biting down on since the first period.
But she kept pushing. Kept grinding through shifts.
Kept winning board battles with positioning and timing because that was what she did and it was all she knew how to do.